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RECOMMENDED VIDEOS

Perhaps you haven't caught it by now, or simply need reason to watch it again: the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and set in the 1950s London fashion scene.

Kinet, the online avant-garde publishing platform co-programmed by MUBI's Kurt Walker, has released their seventh program in the form of an ambitious Halloween-themed omnibus film entitled Aos Sí. It includes new films by Gina Telaroli, Raya Martin, Sophy Romvari, Neil Bahadur, Walker, and many more.

At the Toronto International Film Festival, we loved Louis CK's I Love You Daddy, a dark comedy of artistry and perversion. The film, CK's first since Pootie Tang, shot on the downlow and on 35mm, has a trailer and is set for a November release.

A fascinating survey from Alan Warburton on the state of photorealistic CGI and the next frontier for its application in blockbuster filmmaking, video art, and falsifying moving images.

RECOMMENDED READING

Brian Barrett has provided a definitive investigation into the open source media platform Kodi and the modern age of piracy for Wired.

Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of North American households have a Kodi device configured to access unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future.

'Peak Michael Douglas,' as we might call it, is the pathology director David Fincher has made his career exploring and criticizing. He even made The Game, a movie about what it would take to break down someone infected with peak Michael Douglas and restore his sense of humanity, and he got Michael Douglas to play the peak-Michael-Douglas character.

In The Alphabet, his early short from the 1960s, letters coagulate and thicken and cause a girl on a bed to vomit. And in The Return, he intensifies a lavish attention paid to communication networks and their physical embodiments: intercoms, cell phones and text messages, laptops, hearing aids. His endings since Lost Highway onward all delight in letting worlds that should be separate seep into each other—culminating in the absolute disorientation of The Return. (It is much more a sequel to the narrative displacements of Inland Empire than a sequel to the soap opera plot of Twin Peaks.) It’s as if the substance from which reality is made in Lynch’s films is always reversible. Every element can change into its opposite—a double, or a new reality.

Asymptote provides a revelatory new English translations of several texts written by Yasujiro Ozu:

You might say that trains, trams, buses, and other such modes of public transportation are the genre paintings of the modern world. Which is to say that even one’s daily commute may serve as a profoundly interesting and educational experience. Fancy and observation have apparently always shared a place in me, and while I may spend my commute reading the newspaper or a magazine, or in contemplation, or making associations, or twiddling my thumbs, or sleeping, or observing my fellow commuters—in which respect I am an entirely ordinary passenger—I have also unconsciously stockpiled anecdotes in my mind.

Notebook
is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a MUBI publication.